Brands, Safety, and Responsibility
Brand safety and brand responsibility have been defined by IPG Mediabrands as being in tension. Like any good duality, however, one can not exist without the other.
Bad news is going to happen. That doesn’t mean news is not brand safe. In fact, supporting news and information in hard times can be very brand-positive. The Brand Safety Institute has gathered tools and insights from experts to help you determine where news fits into your advertising plan, and to help you fine-tune your strategies before bad news strikes.
For a broader look at these issues, check out our Knowledge Center on News & Journalism.
CNN's placement of an ad next to war footage shows brand safety teams that adjacency isn’t a monolithic concept and that context and channel matter.
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) has issued a release with suggestions to help brands navigate brand suitability during this time of war.
The Brand Safety Institute has numerous resources available to help brands assess the challenges of brand suitability.
Connie del Bono's opinion piece suggests utilizing negative keyword lists when advertising on news during times of war and other negative topics.
CNN's placement of an Applebee's ad next to scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is forcing brands to assess if news during wartime is a brand safe.
We followed up on the Local Media Inclusion List to understand if it has worked to allow advertising to reach local audiences, and what challenges remain.
Brand safety and brand responsibility have been defined by IPG Mediabrands as being in tension. Like any good duality, however, one can not exist without the other.
BSI, the Local Media Consortium, and Scott Cunningham, released a “Local News Advertising Whitelist”. Now two months on, a lot has changed.
COVID-19 is an inflection point in an unimaginable number of ways, and we sit here in the middle of it. We must ensure that what has unfolded serves as an opportunity to reexamine our approach to news and how brands relate to stories that touch on potentially controversial subjects.
[N]early half (46%) of respondents said all high-quality journalism should be appropriate for ads. Reinforcing those findings, respondents by more than a two-to-one margin (69% to 31%) said the importance of ad funding for coverage of the Ukraine war outweighed any risk of violent content in that coverage. Only one in four respondents said any specific news topic should be off-limits to ads
People found news content more valuable, trustworthy and interesting... News perceived as ‘heavy’ isn’t bad for brands, instead it drives brand impact: Brand favorability was up +7% and intent to recommend advertised brand was up +5% from ads in news perceived as heavy by participants.
To help understand the effect of sensitive content, Twitter partnered with research company EyeSee to take a deeper look at how content on our platform affects brands. Even when brands appeared adjacent to content in the categories of political or sensitive news, EyeSee saw no impact on brand favorability or consideration.
[I]nstead of blocking controversial news content, 40% of consumers said all news content should be appropriate for ads, and the remainder differentiated between stories involving violence and death and those about policy, societal changes, and peaceful protests on the same issues.
The majority (84%) of consumers say that their trust in a brand is either unaffected or increased when seeing their ads in the news, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).
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